


Stories You Will Leave

by seizethelight



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Implied/Referenced Incest, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:29:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1676465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seizethelight/pseuds/seizethelight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He dreams of other lives, other people who always have the same faces. </p><p>Is that why they can drift?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stories You Will Leave

**Author's Note:**

> Because I needed soulmates fic and because the last line wouldn't leave me alone. 
> 
> Title taken from Laughter Lines by Bastille.

More than once Chuck wondered what made people drift compatible - it had to be different for everyone, more than the father-son bond, because siblings, spouses, even strangers could drift together, if the circumstances were right. What made Herc his partner and why were they so good at it? It plagued his thoughts in training, the downtime between kills, watching new recruits pair off and fight, come into their own.

It had to be more than blood or sex or random chance. 

Then Chuck dreamed one night about the crested tuft of a war helmet cast onto a stony ledge, long fingers gripping into weary muscle, and a familiar ginger head bobbing between his thighs as a victory prize for surviving the battle against the Athenians. He woke up the image of a spear in his chest, the feel of blood cascading down his chest and words-something important- caught in his throat.

The next dream was nighttime in a snowy field in Germany, a man with HANSEN stamped into his tags, chest to chest with Chuck, trying to keep quiet in a damp hole in the ground while their cocks slid together in his fist, one perfect stolen moment before the mortars started exploding again. Rearranging their wool uniforms, sharing a cigarette, he was there one moment, gone the next, taking the punchline of the filthy joke he was telling with him. Chuck awakened, bereft and shivering in the warm room. 

He was distracted that next afternoon in training, Herc took him down easily in the Kwoon, had to nearly drag him to the mess and then to the sims. 

Chuck felt the iron weight of Herc's eyes on him as the techs fussed over them both. The hissed "what's wrong with you?" came as they cleared the room. 

"Haven't slept, been having weird dreams. Let's get this over with." 

Chuck slid the headpiece on, shut his eyes, and let the handshake initiate. He was so tired, he couldn't bar his thoughts, the dreams he'd been having sat right at the front of Chuck's mind. Chuck felt the moment Herc saw them, the shock ripple through his system, and Chuck thought his heart might stop at the punched reverb from Herc. Any other time, he’d have cringed at how unprofessional, embarrassing even it was to get caught out like that by Herc, holding the images right there, replaying them on a loop as he had been the last few days. But Chuck was more worried about the hitched reaction from Herc, scrambled to bury them so as not to cause him more distress than he seemed to be feeling. 

"Calm down, Chuck. C'mon kid, breathe for me." LOCCENT was probably going haywire at heightened numbers in their bio feeds, so when he heard Herc's voice through the drift, more clearly than if he'd been shouting, Chuck was present enough to clasp onto it. 

"Not supposed to see," Chuck was trying to shake it off, but Herc wasn't letting him go. 

"Chuck. Just - here." Then Chuck accepted the nudge Herc offered, saw the beginnings of a cathedral somewhere that looked like England. A man with hair like Chuck's was couched in shadow, caught between Herc's body and the outer stone wall. Chuck felt the slide in, the sweaty pale skin under his fingers that Herc was sharing. The man turned back, and Chuck saw his own face, heard the familiar name crossing his lips in a yearning sigh. He tilted his-Herc's?- head down onto the broad shoulder, his own name a mindless chant on his lips, a poor substitute for what he should be saying. Surrounding the warm body with his own, he felt the heat of an arrow against his back, the white hot pierce of it moving through him, what he needed to speak lost. 

Dozens of other moments flashed between them, all different periods of time - huddled close in a Viking settlement in the middle of the winter, crusade banners snapping over them in Jerusalem, the silent dusty outback of the northern territory. With a sickening thud, the last one was Herc, so young, looking down at him in his old RAAF desert kit in the mountains of Afghanistan. He was holding Chuck's broken body to his chest as he tried to staunch the blood flowing from a wound in his belly, begging over and over, "Charlie, just hold on, chopper's nearly here. Don't you fucking die on me." 

Not once in his life had Chuck heard Herc sound so wrecked. The knowledge of what Herc shared knocked Chuck askew, feeling the tear the moment they fell out of alignment. 

Pulling off the sim unit, Chuck disengaged, cut off the vocal feed back to HQ after a terse admission to HQ that he was fine. He couldn't move out of the way before Herc pulled him in, arms wrapped around Chuck's shoulders like iron bands. 

"You couldn't have told me? Not once in all this time?" Shock reverberated between them, shudders that wracked through Chuck.

"Jesus, Chuck, why do you think we drift like we do?" Herc tried to smooth long strokes of his palm down the damp column of Chuck's spine, and it was the first time in longer than Chuck remembered that Herc was touching him outside of their room. Even more alarming was how Chuck wasn't shrugging away, was allowing him to do it.

"They weren't just dreams." 

Herc's hand stilled and he stepped back. "No." The sudden absence of his body heat had Chuck wrapping his arms around himself, because the glacial climate control in the sim room was too much for the clammy sheen covering his skin. 

"So it's not the blood we need for the drift? You're telling me we're, what...soulmates?" 

"Is it better or worse that you know?" The fierce gleam in Herc's eyes wasn't reassuring so much as it was possessive, hungry. Chuck knew that look, felt the ripple of it work through him. He had a sudden awareness, flashes of Herc piercing him with it in every life from this one stretching back into time. 

"It explains a thing or two, old man." 

"See, yeah, that's new." Herc reached for him again, fingers curling into Chuck's hair. "Because you were never my kid before, but you've always been mine."


End file.
